Recommendations based on "The Village Show"

Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.

Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns towards the day-room door. Most days I'd be out sweeping the hall and see who they're signing in, but this morning, like I explain to you, the Big Nurse put a thousand pounds down me and I can't budge out of the chair. Most days I'm the first one to see the Admiss

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'An affectionate and revealing account … Funny, sad, real, rueful.' The Times 'Warm, rambling and self-aware' Guardian The long-awaited, rambling, tender, and very funny memoir from Adam Buxton Ramble /?ramb(?)l/ Verb 1. walk for pleasure in the countryside. 'Dr Buckles and Rosie the dog love rambling in the countryside.' 2. talk or write at length in a confused or inconsequential way. 'Adam rambles on about lots of consequential, compelling and personal matters in his tender, insightful, hilarious and totally unconfused memoir, Ramble Book.' Ramble Book is about parenthood, boarding school trauma, arguing with your partner, bad parties, confrontations on trains, friendship, wanting to fit in, growing up in the 80s, dead dads, teenage sexual anxiety, failed artistic endeavours, being a David Bowie fan; and how everything you read, watch and listen to as a child forms a part of the adult you become. It's also a book about the joys of going off topic and letting your mind wander. And it's about a short, hairy, frequently confused man called Adam Buxton.

‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’ Stuart Maconie ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far and frozen North in The Road to Wigan Pier, celebrated writer and broadcaster JB Priestley cast his net wider, in a book subtitled ‘a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.’ Appearing first in 1934, it was a huge and immediate success. Today, it still stands as a timeless classic: warm-hearted, intensely patriotic and profound. An account of his journey through England – from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home – English Journey is funny and tender. But it is also a forensic reading of a changing England and a call to arms as passionate as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood of its time. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen, writing scathingly about vested interests and underlining the dignity of working people, Priestley influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for change that led to the birth of the welfare state. Prophetic and as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, English Journey is an elegant and readable love letter to a country Priestley finds unfathomable.

Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series RatchedBoisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

In the absence of his managing sister, the ninth Earl of Emsworth calls in the Hon. Galahad Threepwood to help him pair off the assorted godsons, impostors and pretty girls. Fortunately, many years membership of the Pelican Club have given Galahad the edge in quick thinking.

Contains the novels Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Uncle Dynamite, Cocktail Time and the short story "Uncle Fred Flits By".

Britain's looniest war hero completes the third volume of the Milligan memoirs. The nineteenth battery forge into Tunis, cocksure and carefree. They climb on aqueduct with no trousers on (the battery that is; the aqueduct was very well-dressed). Five hundred gunners try to dance with two girls and an old French matron... up there in Valhalla, Monty's laughing fit to burst.

Volume 5 of Spike's war biography sees him dispatched from the front line to a psychiatric hospital and from there to a rehabilitation camp, where he becomes embroiled in a battle with depression. But music, wit, and a little help from friends carry him through to his first stage appearances.

The James Bond epic is the most popular film series in silver screen history: it is estimated that a quarter of the world's population has seen a Bond feature. The saga of Britain's best-loved martini hound (who we all know prefers his favorite drink "shaken, not stirred") has adapted to changing times for four decades without ever abandoning its tried-and-true formula of diabolical international conspiracy, sexual intrigue, and incredible gadgetry.James Chapman expertly traces the annals of celluloid Bond from its inauguration with 1962's Dr. No through its progression beyond Ian Fleming's spy novels to the action-adventure spectaculars of GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies. He argues that the enormous popularity of the series represents more than just the sum total of the films' box-office receipts and involves questions of film culture in a wider sense. Licence to Thrill chronicles how Bond, a representative of a British Empire that no longer existed in his generation, became a symbol of his nation's might in a Cold War world where Britain was no longer a primary actor. Chapman describes the protean nature of Bond villains in a volatile global political scene -- from Soviet scoundrels and Chinese rogues in the 1960s to a brief flirtation with Latin American drug kingpins in the 1980s and back to the Chinese in the 1990s. The book explores how the movies struggle with changing societal ethics -- notably, in the evolution in the portrayal of women, showing how Bond's encounters with the opposite sex have evolved into trysts with leading ladies as sexually liberated as Bond himself.The Bond formula has proved remarkably durable and consistently successful for roughly a third of cinema's history -- half the period since the introduction of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Moreover, Licence to Thrill argues that, for the foreseeable future, the James Bond films are likely to go on being what they have always been, a unique and very special kind of popular cinema.